Kamala Harris and David Daleiden (Credit: Getty Images) Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris ordered a raid on David Daleiden,...
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris ordered a raid on David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, who exposed Planned Parenthood’s heinous practice of selling aborted baby parts.
Planned Parenthood was caught admitting to this barbaric activity, and Kamala Harris, instead of investigating the illegal trafficking of fetal organs, went after the journalist who brought the truth to light.
The controversy began in 2015 when Daleiden, posing as a laboratory wholesaler, secretly recorded conversations with top officials at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, including Dr. Ann Schutt-Ainé, the chief medical officer, and Tram Nguyen, RN, the branch’s vice president of abortion access.
In this video, Planned Parenthood staffers can be seen discussing the sale of body parts from late-term fetuses in a disturbingly casual manner.
According to The Center for Medical Progress, which did the undercover video, the organization in the Houston, TX branch described “delivering late-term fetuses intact and alive and mutilating the bodies afterward to cover up violations of the federal partial-birth abortion law, in conversations about selling fetal body parts.”
In 2015, the National Abortion Federation—representing Planned Parenthood—sought a federal injunction to prevent further dissemination of the footage.
In March 2016, just two weeks after meeting with top Planned Parenthood officials implicated in the videos, Harris ordered agents from the California Department of Justice to raid Daleiden’s apartment and seize the videos, effectively blocking their release to the public.
The raid involved 11 state Department of Justice agents armed with rifles and K-9 dog, according to the New York Post.
Instead of investigating Planned Parenthood's illegal activities, Harris launched a criminal investigation against Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), which has continued for nearly nine years.
This was not just an attack on a journalist but an attack on the First Amendment and the right of the public to know the truth about what goes on behind the closed doors of abortion clinics. Harris's actions were a clear attempt to protect her political allies at Planned Parenthood, even as evidence of illegal activity mounted.
David Daleiden then filed a lawsuit against Kamala Harris, alleging that she conspired to violate his civil rights through a purportedly bogus prosecution when she was California's Attorney General. The lawsuit also names Xavier Becerra, the former California Attorney General, and Planned Parenthood as defendants.
“This complaint seeks justice for a brazen, unprecedented, and ongoing conspiracy to selectively use California’s video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored speech," according to the lawsuit per Fox News.
"David Daleiden became the first journalist ever to be criminally prosecuted under California’s recording law, not because of the method of video recording he utilized in his investigation—which is common in investigative journalism in this state—but because his investigation revealed and he published 'shock[ing]' content that California’s Attorney General and the private party co-conspirators wanted to cover up,” it added.
According to the press release in 2020:
California’s recording law bans secret videotaping of “confidential” conversations where third parties cannot be expected to overhear the conversation. The lawsuit documents many recent examples of undercover video recording by California news outlets, even recording conversations that could not be overheard by others, that the Attorney General never prosecuted.
The California Attorney General admitted in a filing that Daleiden alone among other undercover recorders was being charged for his videos because “those recordings were edited to enhance their shock value” and thus Daleiden was “culpable to a greater extent” than other journalists.
And then during questioning about the elements of the video recording law used for prosecution at the preliminary hearing last year, the California Attorney General declared in open court, “There is no definition of ‘confidential’ in the statute” on video recording. The California recording law in fact defines “confidential communication” at 632(c).
“The California Attorney General first admitted that they are enforcing the video recording law solely based on how they feel about the message being published, and then further admitted they are not even trying to follow the text of the law as written,” Daleiden notes. “CMP’s undercover reporting has been corroborated by the successful prosecution of fetal body parts sales we reported in southern California, multiple Congressional investigations, and forensic video analysis. It is every reporter’s First Amendment right to underscore the gravity of their findings, especially when the politically powerful disagree with them.”
Harmeet K. Dhillon, lead counsel on the complaint, states: “Our federal civil rights statutes were enacted in the wake of the darkest periods in our nation’s history. They are well-suited for the current civil rights crisis we face, a time when powerful politicians allow their special interest patrons to custom-order prosecutions that violate fundamental constitutional rights, and do so even with the knowledge that their actions are ultra vires.”
Beginning under the leadership of now-U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, the California Attorney General’s office targeted Daleiden’s speech under the video recording law at the urging of Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and StemExpress, a fetal tissue procurement company with deep ties to the professional abortion industry.
While running for U.S. Senate, Harris had a secret in-person meeting with Planned Parenthood executives in Los Angeles, including witnesses in her investigation, to discuss issues in the investigation as part of Planned Parenthood’s political agenda in California. Two weeks later, Daleiden’s home was raided by the California Department of Justice.
California DOJ reports reveal that they were instructed by Planned Parenthood’s attorney Beth Parker, a defendant in the lawsuit, to seize “the computers used to produce the videos.” Last year, Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation attempted to intervene in the Attorney General’s prosecution of Daleiden to dictate how he would be allowed to present his defense. The California recording law includes an absolute protection for recordings made for the purpose of gathering evidence of violent crimes, and Planned Parenthood and NAF wanted to block off any evidence or testimony that would reveal criminality in their fetal tissue programs.
The publication of CMP’s undercover videos led to two comprehensive Congressional investigations, one in the Senate Judiciary Committee and one in the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Select Investigative Panel. The two investigations issued dozens of criminal referrals for Planned Parenthood and its business partners for transferring aborted fetal organs and tissues for valuable consideration against the law.
In December 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had opened a federal investigation of Planned Parenthood, StemExpress, and others based on the referrals from Congress. Two of Planned Parenthood’s business partners in Orange County, CA then admitted guilt for selling aborted fetal organs and tissues from Planned Parenthood against the law in a $7.8 million settlement, and the Orange County District Attorney credited CMP’s undercover reporting with prompting the successful case.
Fortunately, in May 2024, a San Francisco District Court ruled that CMP cannot be prevented from republishing any footage subpoenaed by Congress.
You can watch the full 21-minute video below:
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